Not anymore (in Denmark, at least). They use some kind of membrane technique, I hear. Some of my fellow chemistry students analysed the absolute ethanol with GC-MS to make sure, no benzene present. And this was 10 years ago. However, absolute is more expensive, and there really is no reason to use it.

We did snipe hunts in college. It really surprised me that some of my fellow students might not have known that snipe hunts were fake, though it was less surprising that some of them didn't know that snipe throw water balloons. (It may be that the "hunters" did know that the whole process was a game, and assumed that everybody knew that and thought it was an excuse to run around the woods at night and drink beer, which it mostly was, and that playing the "hunters" might get them first crack at the beer.)

For anyone who missed the joke, this is a reference to a particularly obnoxious quest from World of Warcraft where the required items have a very low drop rate - meaning the player has to slaughter a preposterous number of yetis in order to complete it.

But when you've got a readership the size of/. even low per-person probability events can have significant probability of occurring. I've briefly played other CRPGs, but if people frequently talk about WoW quest rewards on places like/. it must go straight over my head because I don't recall noticing it.

Nah, he showed up today:-) It seemed likely that it was some kind of gamer reference, but normally Yetis aren't portrayed as something that would have horns - they're usually humanoid or ape-like. So maybe a yeti pelt would protect you against frost damage, or maybe eating a yeti corpse would get the gods angry at you for being a cannibal (if you're playing Nethack as some kind of human.)

I don't play wow, have no intention of playing wow, but I know everything there is to know about wow by benefit of having a device with an internet connection. Most people who have a touch of interest in games, image boards, discussion forums, or who read slashdot regularly should be able to spot a wow reference a mile away by now.

So your claim is that you know everything there is to know about everything by virtue of having an internet connection, and so everyone else should too?

I'm sure I have played many games that I could drop references to that you have never even heard of.

Instead of paying a group of scientists to run around out there, why don't they equip a drone with an infrared camera to do a swath of the area and locate and photograph anything with a heat signature about the size of a deer or larger? Sure, you'll get a lot of deer, but you're more likely to sight the yeti this way than not.

Actually you're more likely not to sight the yeti this way, because there is no yeti. At least their way the scientists can drink vodka and have a story that might get them some tail in the future (so long as they leave out the part about the yeti and focus on the snow capped mountains).

You mean more likely to site the yeti this way then any other method. "More likely to site the yeti this way then not" implies a high probability of it existing. To me a rise in sitings without a rise in photographic evidence in this day and age, is a tale tell sign it is unlikely to be real. Your average 10 year old has a 3 megapixel camera on their celphone. So if the yeti, bigfoot, the lochness monster etc... exist and are being sited more often by people now then they used to be, why don't we have any n

Not that such a thing exists, but if it did, infrared may not be the way to go. If something has adapted to live in Siberia, it will be well insulated which means that the temperature of the outermost layers of skin and/or fur will remain close to ambient temperatures. Polar bears, for example, are not effectively detected on infrared cameras.

Not that such a thing exists, but if it did, infrared may not be the way to go. If something has adapted to live in Siberia, it will be well insulated which means that the temperature of the outermost layers of skin and/or fur will remain close to ambient temperatures. Polar bears, for example, are not effectively detected on infrared cameras.

So what? All they have to do is send the drones in and look for places without a heat signature?:)

Many people think the search for cryptids is a waste of time, and not an area where any serious discoveries could be made, due to the large number of very unscientific crackpots.

The alarming number of such crackpots claiming to be cryptozoologists casts a very thick layer of tarnish on the more sincere and truly scientific in that speciality, but the assertion that nothing good can come from those few, due to the noise in the channel from the many, is not a sound assertion, and is a guilt by association rhetorical fallcy.

Other people will assert that any large macrofauna like "sasquatch", or "yeti" would surely have been discovered by now, but that is also an erroneous assertion. (Not that far removed from the false assertions made by several prominent politicians concerning the closure of patent offices during the 1900s, basing such rhetoric on the assertion that "everything worthy of a patent has already been invented." History clearly shows this is not the case.)

If these are *real* scientists looking for evidence of a cryptid, then I wish them well, and hope they find something. The methods they report in their field journals will surely be useful, even with a null result.

If however, this is just a bunch of poorly trained "enthusiasts" claiming to be crytpozoologists, but lacking any measure of proper scientific method, then this expidition is a colossal waste, and I hope they get frostbite of the penis for wasting resources and time.

Seriously, you are. We have a branch of science about animals and discovering species. They do actual scientist.Since there is no proof of Yeti, or bigfoot, or lochness monster.

They might as well be looking for Frankenstein's monster.

When a person is so attached to an idea, that they wont let it go even with continuous lack of evidence,, they invent there or science; which would be fine if they applied the scientific method, and proper research, but they don

It hasn't been discovered because it doesn't exist. The wiki article you linked talks about, at length, how nobody has ever gotten anything beyond some footprint castings and hair samples that were inconclusive. Thanks for the link though. Crackpots are fun to laugh at...

Ugh. Dude, I'm not gonna argue with you about the existence of Bigfoot. If you wanna believe, go ahead and believe.

Just try not to make yourself sound like a scientist because that tarnishes the real science going on things like dark energy and curing cancer. Bigfoot people provide ammo to creationists. And that is lame.

I believe I already pointed out that scientists look for mundane things. "Bigfoot", the cultural and mythical creature is not a mundane creature.

A hypothetical large ape meeting the physical description of "bigfoot" is a mundane creature. You can conduct experiments and create hypotheses of the latter. That makes it the pervue of science, even if you don't like it.

Scientists also research how having to pee effects judgement. An ignobel was awarded on that very topic. Simply because something is silly, doe

I used to fully agree with that statement. However, I occasionally watch the show "MonsterQuest" (usually to see where the logic flaw is). They have had numerous people on who identify themselves as "cryptosoologists". The overwhelming majority are crackpots. They have had one or two who appear to be scientists who specialize in examining the specimens that various "monster hunters" have found and identifying what they come from. While they appear to accept that undiscovered fauna may exist, they, also, app

I think my logic was more like:
Until 1983 the words "cryptid" and "cryptozoologist" did not exist, and I'm pretty sure lowland gorillas and orangutans were well known by the western scientific community before that.
Some people who refer to themselves as "cryptozoologists" think they are scientists.
The only scientists who changed their field to "cryptozoology" lost any respect they held previously in the scientific community.

You can play word games all you want but that won't make the lochness monst

Western science, for hundreds of years, insisted such a fanciful creature not only didn't exist, but also couldn't exist.

Citation?
As I recall, biologists weren't sure whether or not to classify Giant Squid as a new species or jsut write them off as just larger versions of already classified species up until the 1990s. It wasn't a matter of biologists saying "There's no, nor could there ever be, such thing as a squid over 10 feet long!" Rather, it was some scientists doubting if the deep ocean in today's world could provide enough food for creatures to grow that large. And do you really think that giant squid attacked Japane

It lives very deep in the ocean, where no sunlight reaches. This is presumed to have little if any nutritional sources, so a squid that size, living that deep, annot exist. It would starve to death.

This was before the invention of reliable submersables that could go that deep, which discovered a wide abundance of chemotrophic lifeforms near deep ocean hotspots.

But you illustrate the point perfectly, when you make declarative statements about something you know nothing about, in this case because no one had any direct experience, then you are just a stupid asshole.

It was not only squids but other deep-see fish that were discovered when submarines could dive deeper and deeper.

I remember reading as a kid some old books/magazines from the 1960ies about the amazing discoveries of weird deep-see fish that were done as submarines started to explore the deep see. They discovered fish living at debts that were not thought to be able to exist..there wasn't any mythological about them, no information or stories that they existed.. scientists up to then believed the bottom of t

If however, this is just a bunch of poorly trained "enthusiasts" claiming to be crytpozoologists, but lacking any measure of proper scientific method, then this expidition is a colossal waste, and I hope they get frostbite of the penis for wasting resources and time.

Even if they're just enthusiasts, they don't necessarily need to follow the scientific method to produce value. They can prove their claims conclusively by capturing one live specimen and bringing it back to civilization.

I've been having fun recently reading the wikipedia talk pages on disputed topics. One of these was about whether parapsychology should be a subclass of psychology or fruitloopery. Sorry, that last word should have been "fringe science".

However, I kind of take the point that the study of nonsense like ghosts can still be scientific, in a way. Well, for a while at least. Certainly a subject like cryptozoology that at least gets some results is surely a science.

How can the purple yeti be so red,Or chestnuts, like a widgeon, calmly groan?No sheep is quite as crooked as a bed,Though chickens ever try to hide a bone.I grieve that greasy turnips slowly march:Indeed, inflated is the icy pig:For as the alligator strikes the larch,So sighs the grazing goldfish for a wig.Oh, has the pilchard argued with a top?Say never that the parsnip is too weird!I tell thee that a wolf-man will not hopAnd no man ever praised the convex beard.Effulgent is the day when bishops turn:So le

It seems doubtful that there is undiscovered fauna the size of a man, although not impossible. That being said, the impact of discovering a tribe of Neanderthals still alive would produce profound effects on society. Would they have 'Human' rights? Can they breed with humans? How would you feel about your sister dating one? What is the status of a human/neanderthal hybrid child? Depending on their intelligence level, it would be one step shy of meeting sentient aliens.

A new species of monkey was recently discovered in Papua New Guinea, along with a new species of large cat, IIRC. There are certainly strange things to be discovered out there.

I don't see a tribe of Neanderthals being among them, though. There is little reason for a hominid to live in such a harsh climate, and they would have interacted and, as we have found out recently, interbred with humans until they were fully hybridized.

If there is a Yeti, the likelihood of it being a hominid is close to zero.

Whether they interbred with humans until they were fully hybridized or not depends on how remote their habitat is, and how shy they are of other hominids. If they are isolated enough to not have been discovered, then it would not be unthinkable that they would not have interbred. I see no interbreeding reason that an ape that has not had contact with humans would be any more likely than a hominid that has not had contacts with humans.

Modern non-African humans are up to 4% Neanderthal (by DNA). So, that would be five generations in breeding terms (1/32nd). That used to be the threshold for being sold as a slave in Louisiana (1/32nd black).

I would hope we would not treat them any different than an Amazon tribe.

There was a large species of peccary discovered a few years ago in Brazil, probably (there's not quite enough data on it). Formal descriptions was published in 2007. It weighs some 50 kg, so the size of a man, if the man is very small. Teh Wiki has teh details. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Peccary [wikipedia.org].

As for interbreeding with them, well, if you have a frank talk with a farmer, you will learn about different local customs.

I did a quick search on this "conference" and I can tell right away this is a typical pseudoscience gathering.The organizer, Igor Burtsev, holds a degree in a different area (history) and everything he published about yeti so far was sensationalist drivel, not scientific research.Oh, it is on Fox News website? Must be fair and balanced then. Sorry.

Is this pseudoscientific tripe what this website has been reduced to? I'm speaking as a molecular biologist here; please bring some sort of journalistic integrity back to this site! This is fucking ridiculous.

Speaking as a molecular biologist? Wot.

If you were a zoologist - perhaps even a cryptozoologist - this might make sense. Yes it is very doubtful that some human (-like?) species is still alive - but then again, there was Homo floresiensis which may have been alive as little as 12,000 years ago. It's not impossible that some tiny population has hung on in the very large wild areas of Siberia.

It's not impossible that some tiny population has hung on in the very large wild areas of Siberia.

It's not impossible that some tiny proportion of supermodels are in fact alien spies sent to destroy humanity, who can only be uncovered by having sex with them and noticing the peculiar colour they turn when they orgasm.

Oddly, my research application to selflessly study this phenomenon has not yet been approved by any government..

I'm not sure about that area of Siberia, but the more sparse the vegetation the better. Sasquatch is typically reported in fairly dense forests, while the Yeti is seen in more mountainous areas. This would make using thermal imaging for locating it much easier.